Dèjá vu...
...and here's the schedule for Week 4..... or is it? Wasn't this originally called the February fund drive?
An unvarnished blog that dips into the past and comments on the present of WBAI-FM, a once significant, intelligent New York radio station that for years has suffered chronic abuse from within and now nears extinction. Your comments are welcomed and will not be censored.
Did you hear Gary Null this afternoon? He was threatening (again) to sic his lawyers on someone or another.
ReplyDeleteHe makes me think of the cartoon character who used to inflate his fist like a baloon. We all know how effective that was.
I missed that one, Justine, but I'll check the archive. This very extended drive is not bringing in what Reimers expected—who know how much they will actually receive. In the meantime, new bills must be coming in, and I think we all know how short-sighted these people are. The severance debt is due to be paid in a couple of days (I can hear attaché cases being readied) and we are getting very close to the end of Pacifica's decision date.
DeleteIn the meantime, Null goes on and on about his "generosity", Felipe Luciano continues having his hissy fits over Puerto Ricans who don't acknowledge their African origins, Cathy Davis takes her philosophical ramblings to hitherto unimagined depths, Haskins does his golly gee thing, Mimi Rosenberg gets all blurry-eyed over the brilliance of Mumia, Geoff Brady hunts for reptilian eggs on Capitol Hill and—as Linda Ellerby used to say—so it goes.
I thought it was Kurt Vonnegut who gets credit for that ceaseless trope or refrain, "And so it goes," in SCHLACHTHOF FUNF.....
DeleteCould be, but Linda Ellerbie used to end her newscasts with that.
DeleteI have my doubts as to this fund drive ever ending.It might be an unfair comparison, but I listen to WQXR(classical music) also and I think their drive only lasted a week. I could be wrong. Or it could be they didn't beg as much.Or maybe they actually have programs that people actually want to support.
ReplyDeleteI think the latter is a big factor.. When we had our first marathons, they took place once a year, lasted for one or two weeks—if that—and needed no "premiums." The entire focus was on maintaining the programs we already had and being able to continue airing that kind of diverse and intelligent material.
DeleteThe mere fact that they must sell products in order to stay on the air should tell them something. The options are: vastly improve the programming or turn the station over to someone who can.
Read in the NYT today that WNYC and its sister stations in NY have been
ReplyDeletegiven a $10M grant, the biggest ever to a public radio station. So I
thought... what would have happened had that grant instead been given to
WBAI?
And I imagined... a new generation of Lynn Samuels, Steve Posts, Mike
Feders... intelligent, talented folks who love radio, come to clean
house and show NY how good leftist radio is done.
And then I thought... nah. Ten million would just mean an awful lot of
Green Stuff and conspiracy DVDs in the mail (or not), and a nice summer home in
Ibiza for Gary Null.
Sigh.
You may be right, but rest assured that Steve Post loves himself more than any radio. He is one nasty SOB who stepped over people to get to that microphone and, once he got it, used it to spread vicious lies about some very good and true friends of WBAI...Tana DeGamez, Barbara Dane, and other.
DeleteChris and Logan,
ReplyDeleteThe more I hear of the current WBAI, the more I miss Lynn Samuels and Mike Feder. At least there are still others, but they seem more and more marginalized at the station. I'm talking about folks like Ivan Hametz, Chris Whent, David Rothenberg and Michio Kaku. They seem like islands, whereas at the old BAI, they--and Feder, Samuels as well as others--were part of a wider terrain of information and intelligent entertainment.
Indeed! On the one hand, one may wonder why the good people don't abandon this snake pit....on the other hand, we have to admire them for doing good radio in such an appalling environment.
Delete